Where The Newspaper Stands

June 24, 2007

Looking back ...

It's a long road that brought us to this transportation mess

The present rush -- the thoroughly transparent rush -- to steal some political advantage at the expense of local elected officials on the Peninsula needs to be tempered by historical understanding. The supervisors and city council members who voted "yes" on regional transportation funding may have pushed it across the goal line, but they hardly get credit or blame for creating this thing.

FOR THE RECORD - Published correction ran Tuesday, June 26, 2007.A list on Sunday's editorial page noted the local delegation's votes on the transportation bill in the 2007 General Assembly session. That list applied to the bill as passed during the regular session, and showed Dels. Bill Barlow and Jeion Ward as voting against the bill. Gov. Tim Kaine made changes to the bill after the regular session and the full Assembly considered his amendments in April. Barlow and Ward then voted in favor of the amended bill. (Text corrected.)

New taxes, fees and tolls, via the newly enacted authority, will be imposed upon the residents of 12 cities and counties of Hampton Roads in order to raise $168 million for long-overdue tunnels and roads. Think that stinks? Want to blame someone? Well, point your rage in the right direction.

To borrow some biblical parlance, let's see who or what "begat" the authority.

How about the following former governors? Doug Wilder, George Allen and Jim Gilmore. All three knew that the fast pace of growth in Virginia would eventually overcome the funds available to maintain existing state roads and build new ones. All three of them punted.

Wilder at least had a good reason. His administration followed on the heels of Gov. Gerald Baliles' big road push in 1986 and got clobbered by an economic recession that drained state revenues.

Allen? No excuse. He liked the spending part, but didn't want to get his hair messed with the nasty business of raising taxes.

Same thing with Gilmore. His administration came into office in 1998 and, by then, the strains on road funding were obvious. But new revenue? After winning office on the specious "No Car Tax" bumper sticker, not a chance. Gilmore preferred to borrow against future federal revenues, an approach that suited the former governor's political needs at the expense of taxpayers saddled with debt payments. Moreover, Gilmore clearly fretted about interrupting the ascendancy of the GOP in the General Assembly, a process largely driven by "have-it-for-nothing" politics.

As a result, by the time Mark Warner got into the governor's office in 2002, the term "transportation crisis" was no longer hyperbolic. And, sure enough, the anti-tax crowd -- primarily Republicans in the House of Delegates -- rejected every transportation proposal Warner offered.

That is, with the exception of the 2002 regional road referendum, which bombed at the polls. The organized opposition to what constituted a minor increase in the sales tax was led, in part, by Brenda Pogge, now the presumed GOP candidate to replace vacating York County Del. Melanie Rapp.

Pogge's proud of that. She says she protected the citizens of Hampton Roads. "I am the only candidate who not only publicly opposed that referendum, but I did something about it," she wrote in a recent campaign message. No question about that. But what are the consequences?

The needs didn't vanish. In fact, they're greater now. And the costs of the projects that would have been funded five years ago have increased substantially.

So, would Pogge accept some of the responsibility for setting the stage for the new transportation authority, taxes and fees included? Not likely. It's much more fun to hurl generic complaints at the Virginia Department of Transportation than to actually pay for something.

Have we anyone else to finger? Gov. Tim Kaine. He signed the thing, so he bears the burden, too. But at least he fought for a more reasonable, state-based alternative. So did leading centrist, pragmatic members of the state Senate. Better to go at transportation funding as one commonwealth, many of them sensibly argued, rather than as a Balkanized collection of regions.

So who/what does that leave us with? Well, the proximate cause of the new Hampton Roads regional transportation authority can be found in the no-tax wing of the GOP caucus in the Virginia House of Delegates. They wrote it. They pushed it. They blocked better, simpler ideas. They got it out of the General Assembly.

Therefore, if you don't like what's coming in taxes and fees, you may wish to check in with your local Republican delegate for an explanation of exactly what he or she thinks.

But let's be real. Legislators come and go. This took more than passing power. This mightily imperfect arrangement was seeded, watered and otherwise cultivated by 20 years of neglect and free-lunch political nonsense.

Voters of Virginia, take a bow.

... looking ahead

What voters can do about the new transportation authority

So it's all over but the paying and the paving, right?

Or is it?

With Isle of Wight's vote on June 14, the new regional transportation authority is good to go. It will collect an array of fees and taxes laid out in a law passed by the General Assembly earlier this year, and apply them, along with tolls, to building a set of six major regional projects.